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Whereas it is the duty of the Culpeper County Democratic Committee to issue the Call to Caucus for the purpose of electing delegates to the 2017 30th District (Orange, Madison and Part of Culpeper) House of Delegates District Democratic Convention which will be held on the 29th day of April in 2017, beginning at 10 am, in the Culpeper County Democratic Committee Head Quarters located at 102 North Main Street, Culpeper, VA, 22701, on the second floor. Now therefore be it resolved that the Culpeper County Democratic Committee hereby issues the Call to Convention for the 2017 Democratic Party Caucus to convene at noon, at the Culpeper Co. Democratic Committee 102 North Main Street, Culpeper, VA, 22701 for the sole purpose of electing delegates to the 30th House of Delegates District Democratic Convention.

tRump’s #RussiaGate

I’m really getting tired of people deflecting, distracting, and using false equivalence about subjects they’re incapable of understanding. It’s especially infuriating when those people hold elected office in the United States Senate. Hello? Read a briefing. It’ll be one of those stacks of papers with words on it. Probably in a binder of some sort.

Susan Rice served as President Obama’s national security adviser. Republicans really hated her and used her as a negative talking point despite the fact she’s never been under an FBI investigation for treason and sought immunity.

Republicans are accusing her of making requests for the identification of Americans caught inadvertently in surveillance of foreigners, specifically those who work for Donald Trump. Rice has neither confirmed nor denied making such requests, but the thing is, it’s not illegal. In fact, it’s part of her job.

First off, after the national security adviser makes a request it has to be approved by the National Security Agency. Rice said she had sometimes asked for the names of Americans whose identities were redacted in her daily intelligence briefings in order to understand the context of what she was being told. The purpose, she said, was “to do our jobs,” but “absolutely not for any political purpose, to spy, expose, anything.” She didn’t say if she had sought names of anyone from the Trump campaign.

You know, we wouldn’t have this issue if so many of Trump’s people weren’t having so many conversations with Russian spies.

Requesting for an identification is referred as “unmasking.” When someone gives a name to the press, that’s called “leaking.” Unmasking is not leaking. Republicans are going to town accusing Rice of leaking Michael Flynn to the press. Who else knew Flynn had talked to the Russians and had lied about it? Oh, only the Justice Department, the FBI, the Trump administration, and god knows who else. The Trump administration kept him on the job for over two weeks AFTER discovering he had lied about talking to the Russians.

There’s not any evidence or smoke that Rice leaked his name (all that smoke you’re seeing is from Trump Tower). Despite this, every single unethical race-baiting conservative website went crazy with the accusations. Trump himself retweeted a link from the Drudge Report with the headline “RICE ORDERED SPY DOCS ON TRUMP?”. Like the all caps and question mark they used? Nice! The rule for conservatives is: If one conservative says it happened, then it definitely happened. Who needs evidence or anything to back up the accusation?

Tom Cotton, a United States senator, said “Susan Rice is the Typhoid Mary of the Obama administration foreign policy. Every time something went wrong, she seemed to turn up in the middle of it.” He was making another Republican reference to Benghazi.

Rand Paul, another senator, said the reports were a “smoking gun.” Rand Paul sure is sucking up to Trump despite the prez once saying Paul debated “without a properly functioning brain” and insulted his looks. Now they’re playing golf together. Maybe Trump had a point about Paul’s brain as, again, unmasking is NOT leaking. Right wing media does not provide smoking guns. And it is too bad about Paul’s face.

Senator Lindsey Graham (who once had his phone number leaked publicly by Trump) said he wanted Rice to testify. Testify based upon a theory? I’m really looking forward to the House and Senate investigations wasting time on Trump’s conspiracy theories. You know, when someone throws you a stick to chase you need to make sure there’s actually a stick.

Another big bonus for these guys is that Rice is a black female. It’s a good day for them when they can combine their covert sexism with their covert racism. Way to go! Score!

To sum up: Unmasking is not leaking. If your entire campaign wasn’t talking to Russians on a daily basis, we wouldn’t be having this issue. Comprehension and not committing treason sure are difficult areas for Republicans.

When Labor Fought for Civil Rights

The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order—memorialized in the classic anthology of that title edited by Gary Gerstle and Steve Fraser in 1989—might be history, but it never gets old. Eighty-plus years after FDR was inaugurated, the New Deal still excites the liberal left imagination even as it, perhaps, stunts it, too. How we got from Roosevelt to Reagan continues to generate conflicting arguments from those who think the New Deal was the “great exception” to American individualism and federalism unlikely to be repeated (Jefferson Cowie); a reluctant capitulation to the white supremacist South which was the best it could do (Ira Katznelson); or, an honorable surrender following the desperate rearguard fight by workers and farmers against the consolidation of corporate capitalism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries (Steve Fraser).

As for white unionized workers, despite all of the stories about how pissed off they are at neoliberal Democrats and how they were attracted to Donald Trump’s trade message, the fact remains that white men in unions have still voted for Democrats at a rate of about 20 percent higher than their non-union counterparts. (This pattern likely did not hold this year. Exit polls from the 2016 election indicate that Clinton carried the union vote by 51–43, the lowest margin for a Democrat since 1984.)

Two recent books about the New Deal order, one by political scientist Eric Schickler and the other by legal historian Reuel Schiller, complement each other in their attention to the relationship between unions and the movement for African-American civil rights. But while Schickler writes a story of liberal ascension, driven largely by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), stopping in 1965 after the monumental legislation of the civil rights era, Schiller chronicles a liberal declension, ending with deindustrialization in the 1970s and tension between labor and civil rights activists. Both books end at roughly the same historical moment. Schickler sees in it labor liberalism’s triumph—the CIO and then the civil rights movement pushing to bring racial justice into the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Schiller, on the other hand, sees the labor movement and those fighting racial injustice, despite their many efforts to work together, as chained to separate legal protocols, doomed to “[talk] past each other.” To paraphrase Bob Dylan, for Schickler, labor liberalism is busy being born at the same time, according to Schiller, it is busy dying.

March 25, 2017 / MCDC / Comments Off on The Media Have Finally Figured Out How to Cover Trump’s Lies

Not just falsehood by falsehood, but as the defining feature of his presidency.

Donald Trump is not on the cover of Time this week, and that must gall him. The president is the subject of the magazine’s cover story, the promise of which apparently persuaded him to grant it an exclusive interview. But instead of Trump’s visage, the cover features a single three-word question in bold red type: “Is Truth Dead?”

The question on the magazine’s cover refers to Trump’s apparent ability to lie, dissemble, and distract from the truth—and to not only get away with it but to ride those lies to the world’s most powerful office. The story within by Time’s Washington bureau chief, Michael Scherer, rightly takes Trump’s dishonesty as its premise, then asks: How exactly does it work, and why, and can it possibly keep working now that he’s president? It’s a good story, thoughtful and—though Trump would never admit it—fair in the sense that it examines its subject’s penchant for prevarication without exaggerating, distorting, or moralizing.

“It isn’t that Time, the Wall Street Journal, and others haven’t confronted Trump on specific claims. They have, of…

When news began trickling out, months ago, that Russia may have tried to influence the American election, the actual news in the U.S. quickly became something akin to a Cold-war era spy novel.

There’s now a vast web of circumstantial evidence and questions surrounding the Trump administration’s alleged contacts with Russian state actors during the campaign, most of which leaked out over months. And for many people, the web of allegations and the Trump administration’s frequently shifting official story has been very difficult to follow.

On Monday, FBI director James Comey testified in front of the House Intelligence committee as part of Congress’ ongoing investigation in the matter. Before his testimony, the committee’s ranking Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff (CA) laid out of all of the circumstantial evidence that has built up so far connecting the Trump campaign to Russian state actors seeking the intervene in the election.

Schiff emphasizes in his opening that he is drawing only on public reports, not all of which have been confirmed. His opening statement, however, is a good summary of everything that has come out so far.